Streep began her professional stage career in 1975 in Trelawny of the Wells and earned a Tony Award nomination the following year for 27 Wagons Full of Cotton. She transitioned to film in Julia (1977), followed by her first Academy Award nomination for The Deer Hunter (1978). For Kramer vs.
Kramer (1979), she won her first Oscar after advocating to rewrite her character's courtroom testimony, shifting the role from a secondary antagonist to a portrayal focused on a woman's autonomy. She became a leading actress of the 1980s with performances in The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), Sophie's Choice (1982), Out of Africa (1985), and A Cry in the Dark (1988), for which she received the Best Actress Award at Cannes.
After expanding into various genres in the 1990s, Streep achieved a new level of commercial stardom in the 2000s. She transitioned from her established dramatic niche to lead high-grossing mainstream successes, portraying a formidable antagonist in The Devil Wears Prada (2006) and a singing lead in the musical Mamma Mia! (2008).
During this period, she continued to receive critical acclaim for her dramatic turns in Doubt (2008) and The Iron Lady (2011), the latter earning her a third Academy Award.
Streep's career honors include eight Golden Globe Awards, three Academy Awards, three Primetime Emmy Awards, two British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs), two Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards, and one Children's and Family Emmy Award. She is a recipient of the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award, the Honorary Palme d'Or, the Kennedy Center Honor, the Golden Globe Cecil B.
DeMille Award, and an Honorary Cรฉsar. In 2014, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She holds the record for the most Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations of any performer, with and 34 and 21 respectively. A prolific artist, her career spans over 64 films, 18 television projects, 30 audiobooks and 20 musical recordings.
Early life and education
Mary Louise Streep was born on June 22, 1949, in Summit, New Jersey, to artist Mary Wilkinson Streep and pharmaceutical executive Harry William Streep Jr. She has two younger brothers, Harry William Streep III and Dana David Streep, both actors. Streep's mother, who she claims looks like Dame Judi Dench, strongly encouraged her daughter and instilled confidence in her from a very young age.
Streep said, "She was a mentor because she said to me, 'Meryl, you're capable. You're so great.' She was saying, 'You can do whatever you put your mind to. If you're lazy, you're not going to get it done. But if you put your mind to it, you can do anything.' And I believed her." Although she was naturally more introverted than her mother, when she later needed an injection of confidence in adulthood, she would consult her mother at times for advice.
Streep was raised as a Presbyterian in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and attended Cedar Hill Elementary School and the Oak Street School, which was a junior high school at that time. In her junior high debut, she starred as Louise Heller in the play The Family Upstairs. In 1963, the family moved to Bernardsville, New Jersey, where she attended Bernards High School.
As a "gawky kid with glasses and frizzy hair", she liked to show off in front of the camera in family home movies from a young age. At age 12, Streep was selected to sing at a school recital, leading to her having opera lessons from Estelle Liebling. Despite her talent, she later remarked, "I was singing something I didn't feel and understand.
That was an important lessonโnot to do that. To find the thing that I could feel through." She quit after four years. Streep had many Catholic school friends and regularly attended Mass. She was a high school cheerleader for the Bernards High School Mountaineers. She was also chosen as the homecoming queen her senior year.
Although Streep appeared in numerous school plays during her high school years, she was uninterested in serious theater until acting in the play Miss Julie at Vassar College in 1969, in which she gained attention across the campus. Vassar drama professor Clinton J. Atkinson noted, "I don't think anyone ever taught Meryl acting.
She really taught herself." Streep demonstrated an early ability to mimic accents and to quickly memorize her lines. She earned her AB in drama cum laude in 1971, before applying for a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the Yale School of Drama. At Yale, she supplemented her course fees by working as a waitress and typist, and appeared in over a dozen stage productions per year; at one point, she became overworked and developed ulcers, so she contemplated quitting acting and switching to study law.
Streep played a variety of roles on stage, from Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream to an 80-year-old woman in a wheelchair in a comedy written by then-unknown playwrights Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato. She was a student of choreographer Carmen de Lavallade, whom she introduced at the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors.
Another of her teachers was Robert Lewis, a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Streep disapproved of some of the acting exercises she was asked to do, remarking that one professor taught the emotional recall technique by delving into personal lives in a way she found "obnoxious". She earned her MFA in drama from Yale in 1975.
She also enrolled as a visiting student at Dartmouth College in 1970 and received an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the college in 1981.
Career
1970s: Early work and breakthrough
One of Streep's first professional jobs in 1975 was at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Playwrights Conference, during which she acted in five plays over six weeks. She moved to New York City in 1975, and was cast by Joseph Papp in a production of Trelawny of the Wells at the Vivian Beaumont Theater, opposite Mandy Patinkin and John Lithgow.
She went on to appear in five more roles in her first year in New York, including in Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions of Henry V, The Taming of the Shrew with Raul Julia, and Measure for Measure opposite Sam Waterston and John Cazale. She entered into a relationship with Cazale at this time, and resided with him until his death three years later.
She starred in the musical Happy End on Broadway, and won an Obie for her performance in the off-Broadway play Alice at the Palace.
Although Streep had not aspired to become a film actor, Robert De Niro's performance in Taxi Driver (1976) had a profound impact on her; she said to herself, 'That's the kind of actor I want to be when I grow up.' Streep began auditioning for film roles, and underwent an unsuccessful audition for the lead role in Dino De Laurentiis's remake of the action adventure King Kong which was released in 1976.
De Laurentiis, referring to Streep as she stood before him, said in Italian to his son: "This is so ugly. Why did you bring me this?" Unknown to Laurentiis, Streep understood Italian, and she remarked, "I'm very sorry that I'm not as beautiful as I should be, but, you know โ this is it. This is what you get." She continued to work on Broadway, appearing in the 1976 double bill of Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Arthur Miller's A Memory of Two Mondays.
She received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Play. Streep's other Broadway credits include Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard and the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill musical Happy End, in which she had originally appeared off-Broadway at the Chelsea Theater Center. She received Drama Desk Award nominations for both productions.
Streep's first feature film role came opposite Jane Fonda in the 1977 film Julia, in which she had a small role during a flashback sequence. Most of her scenes were edited out, but the brief time on screen horrified the actress, "I had a bad wig and they took the words from the scene I shot with Jane and put them in my mouth in a different scene.
I thought, I've made a terrible mistake, no more movies. I hate this business." However, Streep stated in 2015 that Fonda had a lasting influence on her as an actress, and credited her with opening "probably more doors than I probably even know about". Robert De Niro, who had spotted Streep in her stage production of The Cherry Orchard, suggested that she play the role of his girlfriend in the war film The Deer Hunter (1978).
Cazale, who had been diagnosed with lung cancer, was also cast in the film, and Streep took on the role of a "vague, stock girlfriend" to remain with Cazale for the duration of filming. Pauline Kael, who later became a strong critic of Streep, remarked that she was a "real beauty" who brought much freshness to the film with her performance.
The film's success exposed Streep to a wider audience and earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.
In the 1978 miniseries Holocaust, Streep played the leading role of a German woman married to a Jewish artist played by James Woods in Nazi era Germany. She found the material to be "unrelentingly noble" and professed to have taken on the role for financial gain. Streep travelled to Germany and Austria for filming while Cazale remained in New York.
Upon her return, Streep found that Cazale's illness had progressed, and she nursed him until his death on March 12, 1978. With an estimated audience of 109 million, Holocaust brought a wider degree of public recognition to Streep, who found herself "on the verge of national visibility". She won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or a Movie for her performance.
Despite the awards success, Streep was still not enthusiastic towards her film career and preferred acting on stage.
She played the supporting role of Leilah in Wendy Wasserstein's Uncommon Women and Others in a May 1978 "Theater in America" television production for PBS's Great Performances. She replaced Glenn Close, who played the role in the Off-Broadway production at the Phoenix Theatre. Hoping to divert herself from the grief of Cazale's death, Streep accepted a role in The Seduction of Joe Tynan (1979) as the chirpy love interest of Alan Alda, later commenting that she played it on "automatic pilot".
She performed the role of Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew for Shakespeare in the Park. That same year she played a supporting role as the former girlfriend turned lesbian in Manhattan (1979) for Woody Allen. Streep later said that Allen did not provide her with a complete script, giving her only the six pages of her own scenes, and did not permit her to improvise a word of her dialogue. Vincent Canby of The New York Times described her performance as being "beautifully played".
In the drama Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Streep was cast opposite Dustin Hoffman as an unhappily married woman who abandons her husband and child. Streep thought that the script portrayed the female character as "too evil" and insisted that it was not representative of real women who faced marriage breakdown and child custody battles.
The makers agreed with her, and the script was revised. In preparing for the part, Streep spoke to her own mother about her life as a wife with a career, and frequented the Upper East Side neighborhood in which the film was set, watching the interactions between parents and children. The director Robert Benton allowed Streep to write her own dialogue in two key scenes, despite some objection from Hoffman, who "hated her guts" at first.
Hoffman and producer Stanley R. Jaffe later spoke of Streep's tirelessness, with Hoffman commenting: "She's extraordinarily hard-working, to the extent that she's obsessive. I think that she thinks about nothing else, but what she's doing." The film was controversial among feminists, but it was a role which film critic Stephen Farber believed displayed Streep's "own emotional intensity", writing that she was one of the "rare performers who can imbue the most routine moments with a hint of mystery".
For the film, Streep won both the Golden Globe Award and the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, which she famously left in the ladies' room after giving her speech. She received awards from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, National Board of Review and National Society of Film Critics for her collective work in her three film releases of 1979.
Both The Deer Hunter and Kramer vs. Kramer were major commercial successes and were consecutive winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture.
1980s: Rise to prominence
In 1979, Streep began workshopping Alice in Concert, a musical version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with writer and composer Elizabeth Swados and director Joseph Papp; the show was put on at New York's Public Theater from December 1980. Frank Rich of The New York Times referred to Streep as the production's "one wonder", but questioned why she devoted so much energy to it.
By 1980, Streep had progressed to leading roles in films. She was featured on the cover of Newsweek magazine with the headline "A Star for the 80s"; Jack Kroll commented, "There's a sense of mystery in her acting; she doesn't simply imitate (although she's a great mimic in private). She transmits a sense of danger, a primal unease lying just below the surface of normal behavior".
Streep denounced her fervent media coverage at the time as "excessive hype". The story within a story drama The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) was Streep's first leading role. The film paired Streep with Jeremy Irons as contemporary actors, telling their modern story, as well as the Victorian era drama they were performing.
Streep developed an English accent for the part, but considered herself a misfit for the role: "I couldn't help wishing that I was more beautiful". A New York magazine article commented that, while many female stars of the past had cultivated a singular identity in their films, Streep was a "chameleon", willing to play any type of role.
Streep was awarded a BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her work. The following year, she re-united with Robert Benton for the psychological thriller, Still of the Night (1982), co-starring Roy Scheider and Jessica Tandy. Vincent Canby, writing for The New York Times, noted that the film was an homage to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, but that one of its main weaknesses was a lack of chemistry between Streep and Scheider, concluding that Streep "is stunning, but she's not on screen anywhere near long enough".
Greater success came later in the year when Streep starred in the drama Sophie's Choice (also 1982), portraying a Polish survivor of Auschwitz caught in a love triangle between a young naรฏve writer (Peter MacNicol) and a Jewish intellectual (Kevin Kline). Streep's emotional dramatic performance and her apparent mastery of a Polish accent drew praise.
William Styron wrote the novel with Ursula Andress in mind for the role of Sophie, but Streep was determined to get the role. Streep filmed the "choice" scene in one take and refused to do it again, finding it extremely painful and emotionally exhausting. That scene, in which Streep is ordered by an SS guard at Auschwitz to choose which of her two children would be gassed and which would proceed to the labor camp, is her most famous scene, according to Emma Brockes of The Guardian who wrote in 2006: "It's classic Streep, the kind of scene that makes your scalp tighten, but defter in a way is her handling of smaller, harder-to-grasp emotions".
Among several acting awards, Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, and her characterization was voted the third greatest movie performance of all time by Premiere magazine. Roger Ebert said of her delivery, "Streep plays the Brooklyn scenes with an enchanting Polish-American accent (she has the first accent I've ever wanted to hug), and she plays the flashbacks in subtitled German and Polish.
There is hardly an emotion that Streep doesn't touch in this movie, and yet we're never aware of her straining. This is one of the most astonishing and yet one of the most unaffected and natural performances I can imagine". Pauline Kael, on the contrary, called the film an "infuriatingly bad movie", and thought that Streep "decorporealizes" herself, which she believed explained why her movie heroines "don't seem to be full characters, and why there are no incidental joys to be had from watching her".
In 1983, Streep played her first non-fictional character, the nuclear whistleblower and labor union activist Karen Silkwood, who died in a suspicious car accident while investigating alleged wrongdoing at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, in Mike Nichols' biographical film Silkwood. Streep felt a personal connection to Silkwood, and in preparation, she met with people close to the woman, and in doing so realized that each person saw a different aspect of her personality.
She said, "I didn't try to turn myself into Karen. I just tried to look at what she did. I put together every piece of information I could find about her ... What I finally did was look at the events in her life, and try to understand her from the inside". Jack Kroll of Newsweek considered Streep's characterization to have been "brilliant", while Silkwood's boyfriend Drew Stephens expressed approval in that Streep had played Karen as a human being rather than a myth, despite Karen's father Bill thinking that Streep and the film had dumbed his daughter down. Pauline Kael believed that Streep had been miscast.
Streep next played opposite Robert De Niro in the romance Falling in Love (1984), which was poorly received. She portrayed a fighter for the French Resistance during World War II in the British drama Plenty (1985), adapted from the play by David Hare. For the latter, Roger Ebert wrote that she conveyed "great subtlety; it is hard to play an unbalanced, neurotic, self-destructive woman, and do it with such gentleness and charm ...
Streep creates a whole character around a woman who could have simply been a catalogue of symptoms." In 2008, Molly Haskell praised Streep's performance in Plenty, believing it to be "one of Streep's most difficult and ambiguous" films and "most feminist" role.
In her next film, Out of Africa (1985), Streep starred as the Danish writer Karen Blixen, opposite Robert Redford's Denys Finch Hatton. Director Sydney Pollack was initially dubious about Streep in the role, as he did not think she was sexy enough, and had considered Jane Seymour for the part. Pollack recalls that Streep impressed him in a different way: "She was so direct, so honest, so without bullshit.
There was no shielding between her and me." Streep and Pollack often clashed during the 101-day shoot in Kenya, particularly over Blixen's voice. Streep had spent much time listening to tapes of Blixen, and began speaking in an old-fashioned and aristocratic fashion, which Pollack thought excessive. A significant commercial success, the film won a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
It also earned Streep another Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and the film ultimately won Best Picture. Film critic Stanley Kauffmann praised her performance, writing "Meryl Streep is back in top form. This means her performance in Out of Africa is at the highest level of acting in film today."
